As of Mac OS 10.5 there are some issues with fltk and front not
working correctly (not coming to the front, not getting focus,
inability to use the menus, or type into the text fields.) A solution
is given here to create a real os-x bundle:
http://www.fltk.org/newsgroups.php?gfltk.general+v:26066 and applying
makebundle.sh to front will mak it work again. I'll eventually fold
this back into the official walkabout distribution.

There haven't been many updates in the last couple of years. With
the macintosh moving to intel and newer versions of fltk and Coin, here
is a new macintosh version..

ftp://ftp.evl.uic.edu/pub/software/andy/WALKABOUTmacinel.tar.gz

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR OS-X AND LINUX USERS: As of version 1,3,2 the
walkabout frontend requires libtiff to run. Please see the Related
(Necessary) Library section below for details on this library.

Walkabout allows you to load in geo-referenced terrains to walk on,
and then drape various textures over those landscapes.

Here are some snapshots of walkabout in action:

While walking on the surface you can drop frags to mark spots of
interest, or you can pre-load a set of flags to appear on the surface
when you start up walkabout.

If you don't like walking, you can fly over the landscape in
walkabout, and look up or down, so you can see the entire landscape as
a slat map from above.

Multiple users can run walkabout simultaneously on different
computers and see each other in the environment as avatars.

Walkabout keeps track of the paths that each user makes through the
space and you can choose to see or hide those paths.

and if you get bored walking on the Earth you can walk on
Mars.

Brief History

Walkabout was originially written in 1995 as an Inventor CAVE(r)
program to investigate moving around scenes with dynamic objects
(floating panels, elevators, escalators) etc to get some practice
writing Inventor code in the CAVE. By 1996 I had switched over to
Performer which was a much easier environment to program in the CAVE.
Now with more inexpensive stereoscopic projection displays available,
and OpenInventor now much more cross-platform than Performer thanks to
the nice Coin3D people, I have resurrected walkabout.

Much of the code was written for elementary school kids to explore
and collect data from virtual environments to learn about the
scientific method, which was sponsored by the National Science
Foundation division of Experimental and Integrative Activities (EIA
0085946)

This effort is also supported by the National Science Foundation
division of Earth Sciences (EAR 0218918 )

And you can also import data from other packages. Walkabout should
happily load VRML-1 files. VRML-2 files are a bit trickier. Some will
load fine, others need to be massaged. The front-end to Walkabout can
do this massaging for some files such as uncompressed VRML(.wrl) files
generated by Global Mapper and MicroDEM. It can also convert some
GeoTiffs containing elevation data. For more information on importing
data into walkabout please see www.evl.uic.edu/aej/macagave/importing_files.html

This publication and its text and code may not be copied for
commercial use without the express written permission of the University
of Illinois at Chicago.

The author disclaims any representation of warranty: use this code
at your own risk.

Related (Necessary) libraries

This code uses the CAVERNsoft library which is Copyright (C)
1994-2002 Electronic Visuazlization Laboratory, available from www.cavernsoft.org

The front end for walkabout uses fltk, available from www.fltk.org and since version 1.3.2
it also needs libtiff and libgeotiff, available from www.remotesensing.org. The
windows version includes all of the necessary dlls. The OS-X version
comes with libtiff.pkg package which will install libtiff into
/usr/local/lib when it is launched. The linux version comes with
libtiff.so.3 and libgeotiff.so which can be placed in /usr/local/lib or
you can set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to include ./ and
leave them next to front.

This code uses OpenInventor, which is available in several flavours
depending on your platform.

One option is the Coin3D libraries (http://www.coin3d.org/).
You can obtain the latest versions from the Coin3D website. There are
two versions of Coin3D now, Coin-1 and Coin-2. Coin 1.0 is Free
Software released publicly under the GNU Lesser General Public License
("LGPL" .) Coin 2.X adds many more features and is Free Software
released publicly under the GNU General Public License ("GPL" .)
walkabout will compile with either one but development is focusing on
Coin 2.X.

The walkabout download contains Coin3D for Windows. Mac and Linux
users should download it separately.

You can also compile walkabout to run with TGS Open Inventor (http://tgs.com/), and it should run fine.

Installing walkabout

Walkabout is provided in a gzipped tar file containing source code
and precompiled versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS-X.

On windows you can drop WALKABOUT.tar.gz onto winzip to get the
WALKABOUT folder. Within that folder you will find versions of
walkabout for the various platforms walkabout.zip. Dropping
walkabout.zip onto winzip will give you another folder containing a
windows installshield that you can use to install walkabout. By default
walkabout will be placed in C:Program Files/GeoWall
Consortium/walkabout/. Walkabout seems to run fine on Windows XP
(Professional, Home, and Tablet PC editions), but has problems on
Windows 2000.

On linux you can "gunzip WALKABOUT.tar.gz" and then "tar xvf
WALKABOUT.tar" to get the WALKABOUT directory. Within that directory
you will find versions of walkabout for the various platforms. For
Linux you should gunzip and tar xvf the files from
walkaboutLinux.tar.gz and then place this directory wherever you want.
Walkabout seems to run fine on Red Hat 7.3 through 9.0 and on Suse 7.1
- 9.1 which are the only flavours I have been able to test on. Red Hat
9.0 is the linux version that is most actively being supported.

On OS-X you can drop WALKABOUT.tar.gz onto Stuffit Expander, or
gunzip and tar xvf from the terminal as in linux. Within that directory
you will find versions of walkabout for the various platforms. Drop
walkabout.sit onto stuffit expander and then place the resulting folder
wherever you want. At this point you should go into the WALKABOUT
directory and run the OSX_CLICKABLE.sh shell script from the terminal
so that the applications will accept keyboard input, which is useful.
Walkabout seems to run fine on all 10.1 - 10.3 when recompiled but
flavours of OS-X though 10.2 is not being actively supported. The
current binary distribution is for 10.3 only

Each of the platform dependent directories comes with one example
scene file - Hickey Mountain, Wyoming.

Among a variety of directories and support files you will find three
applications:

walkabout

This is the application that actually draws the landscape and
lets you walk around on it and share the space with other remote
walkabout users.

front

This is the front-end to walkabout, allowing you to set
display properties (mono, stereo, screen size) as well as choose what
scene to view, create a new scene file, make changes to the attributes
in that scene file, and launch walkabout. As of version 1.3 you can
also use front to convert uncompressed Global Mapper .wrl files to the
more optimizable .iv format for walkabout.

reflector

This is a reflector to make networking multiple walkabout
clients easier. Each client only needs to send information to the
reflector and it will reflect that information to all of the other
connected clients. This way each client only needs to know where the
repeater is and not where the other clients are.

Running Walkabout

Executables are provided for Macintosh OS-X (tested under 10.1.5
through 10.3.4), Linux (tested under Red Hat 7.3, 8, 9 and SuSE 7.1),
and Windows (tested under XP home/pro and 2000).

Walkabout comes with a 'front end' program to make it easier to
configure and run walkabout. The front-end program is currently called
'front' while I come up with a better name. So to start out its
probably best to launch the appropriate version of 'front' for your
computer.

On the Macintosh you can double-click on the front icon: or start front from the command line.

On Windows you can either double-click on the front icon or select
walkabout from the Start menu. All of the necessary libraries are
included.

On Linux (with Red Hat 8 or 9) you can double-click on the front
icon or start front from the command line. You should make sure that
you have the Coin and simage libraries in /usr/local/lib and that your
LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable includes /usr/local/lib where they
are generally installed.

When front is running you will see a screen like this:

Front allows you to set the size of the (each) screen and your user
name. You also set the stereo mode you want to use - whether its
monoscopic, Twin View (Side by Side) Stereo or Quad-Buffered Stereo.
Then you declare where the walkabout application resides. You can also
add commonly used scene files to the list of scene files. Once you have
these specified you can save these settings as defaults and they will
be loaded in the next time you launch front.

After selecting a scene file you can change the settings of that
scene file and save the changes, or just view the scene which will
launch walkabout. Walkabout will use the saved version of the scene
file when it runs. There are 7 tabs to let you change the various
parameters of the scene file.

The User tab lets you change the settings about
yourself - how tall you stand above the landscape, how tall your field
of view is, and the speed at which you move. Show Text shows the
textual overlays. Teaching Mode turns off the display of the UTM
coordinates.

The Scene tab lets you change the settings on the
scene. This gives the UTM coordinates of the corners of the landscape
as well as the minimum and maximum elevations. By default you will
start in the center of the space, but you can also specify the UTM
coordinates where you start out.

The Landscapes tab is where you pick the inventor
(.iv) files which will make up the landscape. All of the files will be
scaled to the size specified in the Scene tab. When you enter the space
you will start out on the first landscape and then you can switch your
view to the others.

The Textures tab is where you pick the jpeg files to
drape over the model. When you enter the space the first texture will
be shown and then you can switch your view to the other textures.

The Network tab is where you set up for sharing the
space with other remote users. You can list as many other IP addresses
where other walkabout clients are (or will be) running, separated by
colons (:). All of the clients must have the same Port which we
typically set to 6000 or a higher port number. The update rate sets how
often (in seconds) your position and orientation is sent. This rate can
be set to 0.5 or 0.2 for very smooth motion. The timeout sets how many
seconds walkabout will wait before removing a 'zombie' remote user who
hasnt sent any position and orientation in a while and has probably
left the collaboration.

The Sky tab is where you set the background sky
colour.

The Flag tab is where you can edit the flags that are
visible in the space. You can add flags within the space while walkaing
around or if you know the UTM coordinates to place them then you can
define them here.

If you want to avoid the front end and start walkabout by itself
then you can still do that. By default walkabout will look for the
default scene file 'Scene' in the same directory as walkabout. If you
want to load in a different scenefile such as 'MYSCENES/cliffs.wbt'
then you need to type: 'walkabout MYSCENES/cliffs.wbt' from the shell.

When walkabout runs it looks something like this:

There is another way that you can startup walkabout on Windows. Once
you have the screen sizes, and the stereo mode and your user name set
and saved, you will be able to double-click on scene files and have
them automatically launch walkabout with those defaults. The first time
you double-click on a scene file (with a .wbt extension) you will need
to choose the walkabout application (probably in C:/Program Files/
GeoWall Consortium/Walkabout/ as the program to execute when a .wbt
file is double-clicked. After that all programs with the .wbt extension
will launch walkabout.

Window Settings

If you use the front end application to launch walkabout then you
dont really need to deal with this, but you can also set these values
yourself with a text editor, or you can write your own front end to
walkabout that sets these parameters.

windows.txt defines the window(s) for the application:

By default it contains:
1 <- number of windows, should stay 1
M <-display mode - see below
0 0 1024 750 <- location and size of left (single) image - probably
something like 0 0 1024 768
Dr_Doofus <- the user name you want displayed on your avatar (with
no spaces)
0 100 0 100 <- the parts of the total image (width then height) this
client is rendering (mostly used on a tile, a single client sets 0 100
0 100)
- <- whether this is a normal client ('-') or a slave ('S') whose
display is driven from a remote walkabout

so by default the file is set up to run in monoscopic mode, to make
it side-by-side stereo for the GeoWall, change the M to an S, to make
it work in quad-buffered stereo (if you have a card like the nVidia
Quadro) change the M to a Q (or q)

You can override these settings on the command line when you launch
walkabout

-master to force it to be a master
- client to for it to be a client
-mode ? to set the display mode where ? can be M, m, S, R, Q, q, A, a
-size minX minY maxX maxY to set the size of the screen
-percent lowX highX lowY highY to set the percentage of the total image
this client is rendering (0 100 0 100 to render it all)

Scene File

If you use the front end application to launch walkabout then you
can modify these parameters using that interface and you dont really
need to deal with this, but you can also set these values yourself with
a text editor, or you can write your own front end to walkabout that
sets these parameters.

Scene contains information on the scene to walk through. They are
usually given the file extension .wbt

it contains a COORDINATES line giving the UTM for the corners of the
scene, given in the order low east, high east, low north, high north,
low elevation high elevation, e.g. COORDINATES (520195 540515 4788607
4802577 0 1500)

if the coordinates are all 0 then the default scaling from within
the main landscape will be used. This is useful if you have a model
that is already built where 1 unit in the model is 1 metre in the real
world.

it contains the SPEED definitions - first the speed for the a/z
keys, then the spped for the up/down arrow keys, and then the turning
speed for the left/right arrow keys, and finally the sidestepping speed
for the g/h keys e.g. SPEEDS (50 2 1 10)

it contains how tall the user is in metres - by default the user is
2 metres tall, that is, their eyes are 2 metres off the ground, e.g.
USERHEIGHT (2)

it contains SHOW_TEXT if you want to see the users's current
location, vertical scale, landscape file name, and texture file name
overlayed on the screen

it contains NO_OPTIMIZE if you do not want walkabout to try and
speed up the landscape by partitioning the geometry. NO_OPTIMIZE should
make things slower, but more compatible.

it contains TEACHING_MODE if you want to turn off the display of
coordinates and the ability to jaunt so that the students have to
figure out where they are.

it contains the user's starting position. By default the user is
dropped onto the center of the space. You can override that and drop
the user where you want, e.g. STARTING_POSITION (525000 4793000)

it contains the vertical field of view of the camera in degrees- by
default it is 90 degrees - the inclinometer is automatically calibrated
to match the FOV value given here, e.g. CAMERA_FOV (90)

it contains the user's inter-pupil distance - by default it is 0.2.
You can increase this value if you want hyper stereo to increase the
stereo effect of objects that are far away. 0.2 is about right for
normal human vision e.g. INTER_PUPIL (0.2)

then it contains the colour of the background given in RGB values
from 0 to 1, e.g. SKY (0.2 0.4 0.6)

it contains networking information so walkabout can send information
to other viewers on the network. REALTIME_POSITIONING_TIME_INTERVAL
tells how often to update the remote display in seconds,
REALTIME_POSITIONING_PORT tells which port to use so you should be able
to leave this as 6000, and then REALTIME_POSITIONING_CLIENT tells which
clients to send the information to - there can be multiple client IP
addresses separated by colons. e.g. for all 3:
REALTIME_POSITIONING_TIME_INTERVAL (1)
REALTIME_POSITIONING_PORT (6000)
REALTIME_POSITIONING_CLIENT (131.193.51.152:127.0.0.1)

it contains the names of the texture files to load in, all in JPG or
RGB format, each in its own line eg:
TEXTURE_MAP (MODELS/DavisTM322.rgb)
TEXTURE_MAP (MODELS/DavisTM543.rgb)
TEXTURE_MAP (MODELS/DavisTM742.rgb)
TEXTURE_MAP (MODELS/cc_aerial_4096.rgb)

it contains the names of the inventor files to load in, each in its
own object line eg:
OBJECT (file(hickey_geomap.iv))

the models may not be in the correct orientation for use in
walkabout so you can rotate them.
For example, from Explorer you may need the following to do a 90 rotate
about X and a 180 rotate about Z: object (file(DavisWhite5.iv)
orientation(90 0 180))
For example, from Bryce you may need the following to do a 180 rotate
about Z: object (file(hickey_geomap.iv) orientation(0 0 180))

by default North is assumed to be at the top of the texture map,
east to the right.

The models (in .iv format) and textures (in .rgb format) are
typically stored in the same directory as the scene file but they can
be wherever you want.

To learn how to create your own scene files, there is a short
tutorial here.

Scaling the Landscape

Walkabout will automatically scale the objects to match the UTM
coordinates and the elevation.

Keyboard Controls

arrow keys move and turn the user on the surface.

A / Z give you accelerated forward/backward motion

F switches between walking, flying, and ghost mode
- when walking you will tend to stay on the ground
- when flying you can not move through the ground but can move
vertically
- when a ghost you can fly and move through the ground

I / K allows you to move up / down when you are
flying or a ghost

G / H allows you to sidestep left or right

E / C allows you to tilt your head up or down

N / M allows you to exagerate the vertical-ness of
the landscape

T switch textures (keeping the same landscape) - each
time the texture is switched, the texture is reloaded from disc which
this allows the textures to change on the fly and have the latest
version of the texture loaded in at each texture switch

L switch landscapes (keeping the same texture)

D displays / hides the inclinometer

R displays / hides the trails showing where all the
users (you and each of the remote users) have been

P drops a numbered flag directly in front of the user
(locations are stored in flags.txt in the scene directory)

S takes a snapshot of the screen and saves it as a
jpeg file named with the current date and time

J brings up the Jaunt menu (anyone else watch 'the
tomorrow people' as a kid?) this lets you choose the coordinates to
teleport to. You will keep your current orientation

The keyboard controls are a little scattered right now, with
creeping featuritis. Once things settle down they may move a bit. You
may prefer to use a game controller to move around the landscape and
toggle the various options. Under OS-X GamePad companion from
www.carvware.com seems to work very nicely, under Linux joy2key works
fine.

As of version 1.3 the user can reconfigure the keyboard controls
using a keys.txt file. A keys.txt file that sets the defaults looks
like this:

The *R *L *U *D represent the arrow keys. All other alphabetic keys
use their upper or lower case letter. I would advise against mapping
the number keys to any actions since they are used to set the jaunt
destination.

Compiling the Source Code

Walkabout and front have been compiled and tested on a macintosh
under OS-X, a Linux box with SUSE 7.1, SUSE 9.2, Red Hat 7.3, and Red
Hat 8.0, and most recently on windows machines running XP and 2000.
Thanks to Yong-Joo and Javier for the assist with the Windows code.

If you want to compile walkabout and/or front yourself, then the
source code is provided.

For OS-X and Linux you should be able to go to the WALKABOUT SRC
directory for walkabout or the FRONT SRC directory for front or the
REFLECTOR SRC directory for the reflector and "configure" and then
"make". If you want to recompile front then you will need to download
libgeotiff for your particular platform and install it. This may also
require you to install libtiff which can also be found at
www.remotesensing.og. You will also need a static version of libjpeg
and libpng. If you want to recompile walkabout you will need glut.

For windows you can go to the win32 directory and use the Field.dsw
project workspace file to compile walkabout under Microsoft Visual C++.
With windows you may also need to compile libjpeg that can be found
under the win32/jpeg-6b directory. You can similarly compile front and
the reflector from within their source code directories.

The coin libraries are included for windows. For OS-X and Linux you
will need to download them from www.coin3d.org.

Multiple Users Sharing the Same Scene

Several walkabout clients can explore the same scene at the same
time and each client can see where the other clients are on the
surface. Each of the remote users is represented by an avatar, allowing
you to see where the avatar is facing. When there are other users in
the space, the textual overlay shows the remote user's name and what
direction they are in.

When you run front, you can use the network tab to list a series of
IP addresses (separated by colons :, e.g.
131.193.51.125:131.193.79.222) that this walkabout will send data to.
If you want to connect up more that two or three walkabout applications
this can get cumbersome, so I've included a reflector program.

Running the Reflector

The reflector acts as a central message passing station. Multiple
walkabout clients can connect to the reflector and the reflector will
reflect the data sent to it to all the other currently connected
clients. This way you only need to specify the IP address of the
reflector in each of the walkabout clients. You can run the reflector
on OS-X, or Windows, or Linux and you will see the screen below. When
you press the 'Start Reflecting' button the reflector will start
operating.

Running walkabout on other displays

I have tried rtunning walkabout on a few different tablet PCs.

On the Toshiba Portege 3500 with a 1.3Ghz processor, and 496 MB of
RAM, it is pretty much unusable at 2 frames per second due to the weak
graphics card.

On the Compaq TC1000 with a 1Ghz processor, GeForce2Go, and 744MB of
RAM, it runs at 10 frames per second, which isnt great, but it is
sort-of usable.

On the Toshiba Portege m200 with a 1.5Ghz processor, GeForce FX
Go5200, and 1GB of RAM, it runs at over 30 frames per second and is
very very usable.

If anyone has any other tablet experiences, then please let me know.

I have also run walkabout on our 5 x 3 (roughly 6000 x 3000) tiled
LCD display - the GeoWall 2 - where each display is driven by its own
PC with very nice results.

For more information on configuring walkabout for a tile display,
click here

Java Map Client

The new java map client is included with this distribution in the
FieldInterface directory!

As discussed above, Walkabout can send the user's position over the
network to clients that can monitor the user's position. These clients
may be other walkabout applications so you can see the remote user(s)
on the landscape or they can be 2D top-down view desktop clients
written in java. This 2D client is called the FieldInterface, and it
can also be found in this distribution.

To run the java client you can go to the FieldInterface/src
directory and type "java -cp ./ FieldInterface" and there is also a
RUN.bat file which does the same thing.

The java client will load up and show the walkabout logo. You can
then go to the file menu, choose open and then locate a standard
walkabout scene file (e.g. hickey.wbt) and it will display the first
texture map in that scene file. If the file contains multiple textures
then you can select which texture to view at any time from the Display
menu.

This java interface can show either the current position of the
user, or show a trace of the users past positions, or show a line
indicating the users past motions. When there are multiple users in the
space there are multiple lines.

You can also zoom in or zoom out on the maps.

You can start up the clients in any order and just as you can have
multiple walkabotu clients receiving data, you can have multiple
FieldInterface clience monitoring.

To compile the java interface you can type
javac *java

For those that are curious, the position information is sent via
UDP, which is unreliable, but if you miss a piece of position data
there is likely to be another one coming in a couple seconds, and for
our Virtual Reality work where the position info is sent 15-20 times
per second UDP is much preferable to TCP. The networking code comes
from the CAVERN group at EVL and was implemented for the Field by
Yong-Joo Cho.

You can run both the java interface and walkabout on the same
computer, if you wish (set the REALTIME_POSITIONING_CLIENT to
127.0.0.1), or on different computers (set the
REALTIME_POSITIONING_CLIENT to the IP of the other computer.)

The original (very primitive) FieldInterface was written by me, then
Yong-joo did a major rewrite, and it was most recently modified by
Jungmin.

PocketPC Client

You can also send the user's position in walkabout to a PDA which
acts like a GPS receiver for the virtual environment. The files are
availale in the GPS_PDA_Only.zip file which can be installed on a
Pocket PC.

On the PocketPC the virtual GPS is called GPS_ITR_2002-1

To communicate with the PocketPC add the IP address of the Pocket PC
to the REALTIME_POSITIONING_CLIENT line of the SCENE file. You can send
the position information to multiple java map clients and PDA clients
simultaneously.

The PocketPC GPS code was written by Yong-Joo Cho here at EVL

Version Changes

Changes since 1.3.2

The maximum number of scene files that Front could
store has arbitrarily set to 10, which is a limit I ran into today, so
now its arbitrarily set to have a maximum of 40 scene files.

The Windows version now comes with a more recent
version of the coin2.dll which should help with vrml2 scenes.

Northing and Easting values now work correctly - not
sure when they went bad, but they are fixed again now.

Changes since 1.3.1

Fixed a problem if walkabout tried to display 0-100%
of the view in one dimension but not the other.

There is now a [-aspect float_value] command line
parameter to adjust the aspect ratio which is very helpful for tile
displays

Front can now convert a GeoTiff with elevation
information into both a .iv file and the corresponding .wbt file. It
also tries to scale the amount of data down so the landscape is
wealkable at a reasonable speed. Since there are so many permutations
of GeoTiffs I'm sure this doesn't handle all cases, but it does try to
handle both tile and strip tiffs, and if you have an elevation GeoTiff
that Front can't convert then please send it to me and I'll try to see
if I can enhance the converter code.

If walkabout is unable to find a texture specified in
the .wbt file then it will substitute the default.jpg texture from the
main walkabout directory.

Changes since 1.3

Front now has a menu bar with a convert menu. This
combines the functionality that was in the 3dem2iv program into the
walkabout front end. Right now it should be really good at converting
.wrl files from global mapper or MicroDEM to a more optimizable .iv
form for walkabout. This converter should convert any .wrl file the is
basically an elevation grid.

The tile display version of walkabout now has an MPI
option. The previous version ran each tile independently as fast as
possible so the tiles were not frame-synced. Now if you recomopile
walkabout with mpiCC and -MPI_ENABLED you can mpirun it and get
frame-sync.

Previously landscapes were back-faced culled
automatically. Now this is done only if Optimize is set. This gives
walkabout better compatibility with general .wrl files.

In the front end, clicking Save Defaults now saves
off the current windows.txt file. Previously the windows.txt file was
only saved when a Scene was viewed. This now allows people to change
the screen configuration easily if they are running walkabout through
MicroDEM.

Changes since 1.2.2

new keys.txt file allows the user to reconfigure the
keys to walkabout.

if all 6 landscape values (east, west, north, south,
high, low) are 0 then the default scaling from the main landscape is
used.

fixed the 'bouncing' when going up steep hills
(really ... it really is fixed this time.)

the flag numbers seemed to suddenly have some odd
problems so that should be fixed.

fixed a problem finding the necessary walkabout
support files on linux and os-x when launching from the desktop rather
than the command line.

Changes since 1.2.1

combined the geowall walkabout code and the tile
walkabout code so that the same source and application run on both
without any tweaking.

Changes since 1.2

speed for flying up/down can now be set in front or
in the .wbt scene file

front end now asks for confirmation if you try to
view a scene file that has changed, or exit without saving those
changes

fixed the 'bouncing' when going up steep slopes
(well, apparently not ... see above)

flags are now numbered

if a flag is given an elevation of -9999 then
walkabout will drop the flag onto the landscape at the correct
elevation

walkabout no longer crashes if you try to change
textures and don't have any

initial status screen now appears while in
fullscreen/gameglut mode

world now has a default size if no coordinates are
specified

Changes since 1.1

transparent title screen is back (lost in transition
to Coin-2)

walkabout no longer crashes on perfectly flat terrain

able to walk under things now for architectural
applications

head tilt now limited to +- 89 degrees to avoid
oddities at +- 90

large objects now automatically broken up into
multiple smaller objects to improve walking speed

walkabout now opens a window before loading in
models, and provides a progress bar to improve feedback while loading

walkabout now brings up a dialogue box asking the
user to wait while new textures are being loaded in

added NO_OPTIMIZE field to frontend and Scene file to
tell walkabout not to try and optimize a given scene in case the
optimizations break the landscape model.

flags and avatars now properly positioned when
landscape is vertically scaled

new anaglyphic stereo mode

walkabout now runs on tile displays

avatar message format changed again (to get walkabout
to work on tile displays)